Case Study
Atlantic Power
Learn how Atlantic Power turned a forced historian end-of-support deadline into a strategic upgrade with dataPARC, connecting ten sites with real-time, enterprise-wide visibility across the US and Canada.
Atlantic Power’s Story
Atlantic Power operates multiple power generation facilities across the United States and Canada, including hydro, gas, and biomass plants. With over 150 employees distributed across multiple states and provinces, Atlantic Power’s geographically dispersed operations require robust data infrastructure to maintain visibility and control across all sites.
“Everyone really likes PARCview a lot. To be able to have multi-trends within one trend and multi-sites, it’s been great.”
Susan Richards, VP Engineering – Atlantic Power
Atlantic Power’s Challenges
Atlantic Power had relied on a historian since 2004, building decades of operational knowledge and workflows around the platform. After it was announced its longtime historian platform was slated for end of support in May 2026, Atlantic Power began evaluating replacement options.
The Pain Points
- Forced migration: Their existing historian vendor was discontinuing support for one historian, forcing them to another. A solution that brought up concerns with Atlantic Power.
- 20 years of investment at risk: Workflows, knowledge, and familiarity built since 2004 could be lost in the transition
- Geographic complexity: Ten sites spanning multiple US states and Canadian provinces needed a unified data infrastructure
- Limited visibility: No ability to view multi-site data on a single trend. Each site operated in isolation
- Uncertain costs: Migration to the legacy vendors new historian meant potentially significant licensing costs without clear operational benefits
The Opportunity
Rather than simply accepting the mandated migration, Atlantic Power recognized this as a chance to improve its operations. A strong recommendation from another company in the power industry gave them confidence to explore alternatives. Hearing firsthand from a facility that understood their exact migration challenge made dataPARC the clear choice to turn a software sunset into a strategic advantage.
The dataPARC Solution
Atlantic Power’s migration from an end of life historian to dataPARC delivered capabilities they had not previously had, transforming how leadership and operations teams monitor their fleet.
Enterprise-Wide Visibility
- Ten sites, one system: All facilities now connected to a single PARCview instance, eliminating data silos
- Multi-site trending: Ability to view all ten power plants on a single trend display, a capability that never existed with the previous historian
- CEO approval: When shown the full megawatt output trend displaying all sites simultaneously, the CEO immediately asked, “How do I get that on my computer?”
- Real-time monitoring: Leadership can now instantly see which plants are running and at what capacity across the entire portfolio
Operational Improvements
- Seamless user adoption: Plant managers building custom trends for startup monitoring and troubleshooting
- Enhanced troubleshooting: Multi-trend capabilities enabling operators to monitor dozens of parameters simultaneously during issue resolution
- Excel integration: Teams leveraging the Excel add-in to analyze multi-year historical data for performance trending and calculations
- Performance tracking: Building calculation models for turbine degradation monitoring using historical runner performance data
“[Multi-trending] is probably the best feature so far for us, by far — we never had this capability of putting this many trends up to see in one place.”
Susan Richards, VP Engineering – Atlantic Power
Strategic Foundation
Atlantic Power successfully migrated all ten sites in one year, establishing a unified data platform that supports current operations while positioning them for future analytics initiatives. The transition from the previous historian wasn’t just a forced replacement; it became the foundation for enterprise-wide performance monitoring and continuous improvement across their geographically dispersed plants.
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Atlantic Power Case Study
Download the case study to see how Atlantic Power turned a forced historian end-of-support deadline into a strategic upgrade with dataPARC, connecting ten sites with real-time, enterprise-wide visibility across the US and Canada.
